clearly the talk show format of 10 minutes with a guest with a few commercials interspersed in is very far from ideal, but just as far from ideal is 1h51m with a guest.
Has someone posted a shorted edited version of this yet?
I listend to the interview as a podcast. It could have gone on for another hour if you ask me.
I really like the long form interviews. It allows the guest to not just make there point but to tell the story how they came to that conclusion. That way its easier, at least for me, to internalise that knowledge.
There is a podcast run by the german newspaper "Die Zeit" [1] where the concept is that the interview goes on until the guest thinks everything is said. The episodes usually last between 4 and 8 hours. The longest taking 9h 40 minutes.
There is one episode with Ian McEwan that is recoded in english if someone that doesn't speak german is interested. That one just takes 2h so its not really a good example.
It’s not a medium with much popularity potential (very few people have >1 hour to spare on something as leisurely as an interview). But for the few people who would care for it, I think it’s super valuable that these things exist.
It’s kind of like the “Slow TV” idea, except instead of touring Norway’s mountains and rivers, you’re touring the landscape of somebody’s thoughts. Very brave on the subject’s behalf. Many people, even public personalities, wouldn’t enjoy such scrutiny.
I just turned it on while doing housework and paused to listen more carefully to the interesting bits. Sometimes it's nice to listen to a person's own words on their own terms, rather than having those words filtered through the lens of someone else's perspectives.
Granted, this one is a bit special to me. I attended the same university as Gosling (decades later) so I could visualize the places and experiences he was talking about, while digging through old memories of my own. It's strange to think that a PDP that I saw in a trash heap may have been the machine he programmed on, and a prof that was teaching PDP assembly in the late-1990's may have been someone he learnt from.
This was over 20 years ago, and the machine itself would have been about 20 years old at that point. At that time, it would have been the norm to dispose of such a machine in such a manner. It was certainly too big to grab for the collection of vintage personal computers I had at the time![1] (To be more specific, it was a disorderly pile of pieces on a dock where equipment was frequently left to be disposed of.)
Of course, I can't be certain it was the machine Gosling used. I don't know how many PDP's the university had. My recollections are also sufficiently vague that I don't remember the exact model, just that it was a PDP composed of many boards. Anyway, the bit about Gosling possibly using it was just a fancy I had while listening to the interview.
[1] Calling those personal computers vintage seems weird now. None of those computers would have been older than 15 years at that point in time, but a 1982 computer would have less in common with a 1997 computer than a 2005 computer with a 2020 one.
> clearly the talk show format of 10 minutes with a guest with a few commercials interspersed in is very far from ideal,
Why is this clearly not ideal? I think you're being overly critical of the production. If the format isn't ideal for your consumption, you don't have to watch it.
Has someone posted a shorted edited version of this yet?